


The Monologue Competition

by lincyclopedia



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, POV Third Person, POV Third Person Omniscient, Present Tense, References to Shakespeare, Shakespeare Quotations, Year 4 (Check Please!)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:20:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29980035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lincyclopedia/pseuds/lincyclopedia
Summary: Ford declares a contest in which the boys must recite theatrical monologues to try to win a hand-knit sweater. Eleven SMH bros compete.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2021





	The Monologue Competition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soliduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soliduck/gifts).



> Thanks to [cricketnationrise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricketnationrise/pseuds/cricketnationrise) for the quick beta and for knowing theater! And obviously thanks to [soliduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soliduck/pseuds/soliduck) for bidding on my fic in Fandom Trumps Hate!

After a particularly brutal morning practice in late September, Ford calls her boys to attention in the locker room and gets groans in response. That’s to be expected; the coaches have just finished saying their piece and everyone just wants to shower and head to team breakfast. But they’ll want to hear this. At least, Ford really hopes they will. 

“All right,” she calls when they’ve mostly stopped groaning (Nursey hasn’t shut up yet because he’s dramatic, but whatever). “So you may have noticed that I like to knit.” 

“Is this really urgent?” Dex growls. 

“I’m getting there, Poindexter,” Ford replies calmly. “I’m planning on knitting one of you a Christmas sweater, but I can’t decide which of you will be the lucky guy, so I figured I’d make a contest out of it since you’re all so competitive. But it won’t be a hockey competition, because, I’m sorry, but I already see you all on the ice enough. Instead, it’ll be a monologue competition. I want each of you to pick a monologue from a play—only plays, no musicals, except _Twelfth Night_ because it would be weird to rule out one specific Shakespeare play, and _yes_ , _Twelfth Night_ is a musical, and no I won’t be hearing arguments to the contrary. Anyway, I want each of you to pick a monologue from a play and recite it for me at the Haus two weeks from today. That’ll give you a little bit of time to pick a monologue and learn it while also giving me enough time to knit an entire sweater for one of you giants. Any questions?”

“Is this mandatory?” asks the backup goalie. 

“No,” says Ford. “I mean, it’d be cool if you wanted to participate, but I’m not going to force you. Obviously, no monologue, no sweater, but it’s your call.” 

“Can we do a soliloquy, or does it specifically have to be a monologue?” Nursey asks. 

“There’s a difference?” Tango says. Of course. 

“Yeah, a soliloquy has no on-stage audience; a monologue is a long speech to other characters, but in a soliloquy the speaker is alone or off to the side,” Nursey replies before Ford can say basically the same thing. Then Nursey turns back to Ford. “So, soliloquies, yes or no?”

“Soliloquies are fine,” Ford says. “Any other questions?” 

“Does it have to be in English?” Louis asks. 

“Um,” says Ford, stalling. She hadn’t thought about that. “I guess not, but I can’t see myself picking you as the winner if I don’t understand what you’re saying. I mean, I do know some Spanish, but I’m guessing that’s not the language you’re thinking of.” 

Louis shrugs. “I mean, yeah, I was wondering about Swedish. I’ll think about that.” 

“You do that,” says Ford. “Anything else?”

It’s quiet for a few seconds, and then Bitty says, “Thanks, Ford. That sounds like a real nice idea.” Then he raises his voice a bit—not yelling, but definitely captaining. “All right, boys. Time to hit the showers. Y’all stink.”

Ford exits the locker room.

* * *

Bitty hasn’t read a play since high school. He’s an American history major, heaven help him, so he’s fulfilled all his humanities credits and writing-intensive classes within his major, and he hasn’t been eager to add any English classes on top of that. He hasn’t been eager to add much of anything on top of it, to be honest—he got good grades in high school, but that had a lot to do with Madison High’s academics not being particularly challenging, as he’s discovered since getting to Samwell; school just isn’t really his thing—but Samwell’s requirements haven’t forced him to take English classes the way they’ve forced him to take math and a foreign language, so he hasn’t taken much in the way of English. 

He’s pretty sure he read three plays in high school English, all of them by Shakespeare: _Romeo and Juliet_ , _Much Ado about Nothing_ , and _Macbeth_. His favorite was definitely _Romeo and Juliet_. Sure, Romeo and Juliet are both painfully heterosexual, but there’s also something queer-feeling about a forbidden love that your family wants to prevent you from acting on, or at least that’s how it always seemed to Bitty. So he googles “romeo and juliet full text,” finds the Folger Shakespeare Library’s PDF of the play, and starts skimming it in search of monologues and soliloquies. He passes a couple that he’s not interested in before reaching the balcony scene in Act II. He remembers this. Okay, yep, monologue chosen.

* * *

Ollie and Wicks head back to the attic after team breakfast—neither of them has class until 11 today. They continue a conversation from breakfast about post-grad plans on the way back to the Haus, but once they reach their room Wicks says, “So, do you have any ideas for that monologue competition? Because I sure don’t, but I’d love to get one of Ford’s sweaters, so I don’t want to just sit it out.” 

Ollie rolls his eyes. “‘Do I have any ideas?’” he echoes fondly. “Pace, you do remember I’m a classics major, right? As in, I’ve taken multiple semesters of classes on ancient Greek and Roman literature? Including plays?”

“Oh, right,” says Wicks, slapping his forehead. “So?”

“Honestly, the hardest part is going to be narrowing it down,” says Ollie. “Like, I’ve read _Antigone_ by Sophocles, _Agamemnon_ by Aeschylus, and both _Clouds_ and _Lysistrata_ by Aristophanes, and obviously this kind of stuff is my jam or I wouldn’t be a classics major.” He reaches up and tips four thin books down from his bookshelf and then holds each one up as he says what it’s about. “ _Antigone_ is about this girl who wants to give her brother a proper burial, but her uncle won’t let her because he says her brother went against the gods. _Agamemnon_ is the first play in the Oresteia, which is a trilogy—I never understand why we read the first part of a trilogy in school sometimes; we did that with the Divine Comedy in high school too, just reading the _Inferno_. Anyway, _Agamemnon_ is about this Greek officer in the Trojan war named Agamemnon who sacrificed his daughter to the gods in order to get to Troy, and then when he comes home after the war, his wife kills him. So those are both tragedies, obviously. 

“ _Clouds_ and _Lysistrata_ are both comedies, more or less. _Clouds_ is about this guy who sends his son to this bogus philosophy school to learn from Socrates—it completely mocks Socrates, by the way, and if Plato hadn’t written an alternative account we’d probably all think Socrates was a hack to this day. And then _Lysistrata_ is about women who dress up as men and pack the assembly and vote to turn Athens into a communist paradise, and scholars aren’t sure whether Aristophanes actually thought that was a good idea and was in favor of women’s enfranchisement or if he was just mocking women the way he mocked Socrates.” Ollie sets all four plays down on his desk and then looks at Wicks. “Do you want a tragedy or a comedy?”

“Comedy,” says Wicks immediately. 

“Cool. _Clouds_ or _Lysistrata_?” 

Wicks bites his lip. “I’m not sure.” 

Ollie picks up his copy of _Lysistrata_ and starts flipping through it while Wicks sits down on the bed. After a couple of minutes, Ollie says, “So, the thing about _Lysistrata_ is that all the men are super sexist. Which isn’t unusual for Greek drama, but since _Lysistrata_ is, like, _about gender_ , it comes through all the time. So unless you want to recite a monologue by a woman—which, again, would be kind of _about gender_ —I’m not sure there are any monologues in here where you wouldn’t come off as a jerk.” 

“Yeah, probably not _Lysistrata_ , then,” says Wicks. “Is _Clouds_ any better?”

“Probably,” says Ollie. “It’s been a while since I read it. Lemme check.” He picks up that play and starts paging through it. “I don’t think you want to be the dad . . . or the son . . . honestly, Socrates doesn’t have that many monologues . . . hmm . . . oh yeah! There’s this part where these two arguments appear in, like, human form and try to convince the son to side with them. I think you could do one of those. Gimme a minute . . . yeah, this one.” He hands the play to Wicks, pointing to a passage. 

Wicks reads it over. “Yeah, looks good to me. I mean, as much as any dramatic monologue will.” 

“Right,” says Ollie. “I think I might want to do something from _Antigone_. Like, I love _Agamemnon_ as a play, but basically all the good lines go to Cassandra or to Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, because Agamemnon is a jerk. And I don’t really want to do a monologue written for a woman either, so. _Antigone_ it is. I mean, Antigone’s uncle is also a jerk, but still.” 

* * *

When Nursey gets back to the Haus and has the space to think about the monologue competition in earnest, the first place his mind goes is Shakespeare. Which—he took an entire class on the dude last semester, so it’s not exactly surprising that that’s the first playwright he thinks of. But seriously. Like, obviously the guy was queer—Sonnet 20, come _on_ —but still, a white dude? Come on, Nurse, you can do better than that. 

The second place Nursey’s mind goes is his African American Literature class, which is a direction he feels substantially better about. He read several good playwrights in that class—Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Zora Neale Hurston—but the one who resonated with Nursey the most was Lorraine Hansberry. Not everyone in that class had loved _A Raisin in the Sun_ , but it had struck something in Nursey, something he’d caught glimpses of when he read _The Glass Menagerie_ in high school—some sense of what it means to be a man, especially a man who doesn’t want the kind of job everyone seems to think he’s destined for—but _A Raisin in the Sun_ made it so much more real by layering the racial analysis of society on top of the commentary on manhood. 

He took African American Literature last year, so there’s no real reason that he should still have any of those books in his room, especially since he only got dibs last spring, but what can he say? He loves books, and especially these books. So he grabs _A Raisin in the Sun_ from his bookshelf and starts paging through it. Huh. Walter has fewer monologues than Nursey remembers him having. There are really just four or five long ones in the whole play. Whatever. This one on page 105 works well, and it only takes one.

* * *

Chowder is a computer science major for a reason. He’s not _bad_ at the other stuff—in fact, he’s pretty good at most academic subjects—but he doesn’t enjoy most of it much. That definitely includes English class. There’s nothing wrong with his English—no matter how many people ask him where he’s “really from,” he was born in California, thank you very much, and even if he weren’t there are plenty of immigrants with better English than plenty of native-born citizens—but as a subject English has never fascinated him. One of the things he’s always admired most about Nursey is the way the guy can analyze literature. Chowder just _does not care_ what Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde or whoever may have meant by some turn of phrase or another, but it impresses him that Nursey both cares and can figure out how to say something meaningful about it. 

But Chowder wants a sweater. Ford is swawesome at knitting and her creations always seem to fit perfectly from a size standpoint and also capture the personality of whoever they’re for, and besides, it would just be really special to have something handmade especially for him by someone who actually knows him and also is good at making the thing they’re making. (Okay, so Bitty bakes Chowder’s favorite desserts somewhat frequently. That’s cool too, and Bitty’s a swawesome baker, obviously, but Chowder kind of wants something he can _keep_ for once.) 

So Chowder is going to learn a monologue. He thinks about it all the way through his 9:00 lecture and his 10:15 class, and by lunchtime he has it. He read two plays in high school, both by Shakespeare. _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ is whatever, in Chowder’s opinion, but _Julius Caesar_ actually kind of made him feel something. And besides, something in him always liked the way the word “countrymen” kept cropping up, especially in that one speech by Antony. So when he gets back to the Haus he googles “julius caesar shakespeare pdf” and searches “friends, romans, countrymen.” And yeah, this speech makes him feel something. He’s going to _slay_ this competition.

* * *

Dex almost decides against doing the monologue contest. He doesn’t _do_ English. That’s Nursey’s thing, 100%, and Dex avoids it with at least a ten-foot pole. But then Dex thinks about the way Nursey will chirp him if Dex doesn’t even try, and . . . okay, fine, whatever, he’ll learn a monologue. Dex got through a lot of his high school English curriculum with Sparknotes, so he’s not really sure what _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and _Macbeth_ are really about even though he was supposed to read them, but his sophomore year of high school they read most of _Much Ado about Nothing_ out loud in class, and it was actually pretty good. Not good enough to convince Dex to read more Shakespeare, not even the stuff he was assigned, but still. It was definitely decent. 

And there was this guy named Benedict, right? He was pretty cool, insofar as any dude in a Shakespeare play could be. Definitely better than the other guys in that play—what were their names? There was Benedict’s friend who totally ditched the girl he’d gotten engaged to way too quickly, and then there was a villain who messed everything up on purpose. At least, Dex is pretty sure about that. It’s been like five years since he read the play at this point. He can’t be expected to remember details. 

Dex googles “much ado about nothing full text,” opens the first PDF that comes up, and starts searching “benedict.” It quickly becomes clear that the name is actually spelled “Benedick,” with a K instead of a T, so Dex searches that instead. A lot of his lines are pretty short—he seems to talk to people named Beatrice and Claudio a whole bunch, and especially when he’s talking to Beatrice the lines are definitely not monologue-length. Then, in Act II, Dex finds a long speech of Benedick’s and scrolls up to get context. It seems like four guys named Balthazar, Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio are saying that Beatrice loves Benedick while Benedick overhears them, and oh yeah, Dex remembers the plot now. Beatrice’s friends and Benedick’s friends decide to trick Beatrice and Benedick into falling in love, and it works. That’s kind of pathetic, but whatever. This is a one-time thing, even if it is a competition in front of his friends.

* * *

Whiskey is pretty sure Ford is going to knit him a sweater, whether or not he wins this competition. He and Ford—and Tango, too—have been hanging out a lot in the past month and a half, and it’s been nice. He definitely feels like he belongs on SMH a lot more than he did last year. It’s not anything Ransom and Holster did wrong as captains—it’s just that he made friends with the lacrosse guys pretty much immediately upon arriving at Samwell and never wanted to stop hanging out with them, regardless of what anyone said. They were honestly nicer to him than most of the SMH bros. And like, he doesn’t need people to be nice to him. It’s fine. He’s just not as in love with SMH as a lot of his teammates seem to be, though it’s better this year with Ford and Tango being as friendly as they are. 

Between his confidence that he’ll get a sweater regardless and his hatred of English as a subject, Whiskey almost decides not to compete in the monologue competition at all. But then he thinks of how that will make Ford feel, and—okay. He can do this. For her. (Whiskey might have a bit of a crush on Ford, but then he might have a bit of a crush on a lot of people. It’s not an issue. It’s _not_.)

He read _Romeo and Juliet_ , _Othello_ , and _Much Ado about Nothing_ in high school and hasn’t read a play since. _Romeo and Juliet_ is boring and _Othello_ is probably not something Whiskey can do sympathetically—he’s pretty sure it would be poor form to play the title character since he’s not Black and Othello _is_ , especially given the whole thing is kind of about race, and (as much as Whiskey often finds himself more interested in a story’s villain than its protagonist) Iago is, like, _evil_ -evil, in a gross way. But Don John from _Much Ado about Nothing_ —yeah, Whiskey could give that a try. He looks up a PDF of the play and searches for Don John’s lines. They’re almost never long, to be honest, and the best speech is so short Whiskey’s not sure it qualifies as a monologue, but whatever. It’ll be fine. Ford will probably knit him a sweater anyway, so he doesn’t need to win.

* * *

Tango knows he asks a lot of questions. He’s known that for as long as he can remember—his mom says that his “why?” phase as a preschooler was more intense than that of any of his classmates or his cousins, and she was pretty good about answering his questions most of the time, but for as long as Tango can remember his mom has been a little bit tired of his inquiries. So he’s always paid close attention to words like “question” and “ask,” because those are often his cue to shut up. 

So when he started hearing jokes about “to be or not to be, that is the question,” Tango noticed and filed the line away in his mind. And when he read _Hamlet_ his senior year of high school, he finally got the reference. And it meant so much more than he’d realized. Hamlet’s not wondering _what_ to be, like what he should be when he grows up or whatever; he’s wondering _whether_ to be at all. Which breaks Tango’s heart every time he thinks about it. He never wants anyone to feel that way. Regardless, when Ford announces the monologue contest, Tango knows exactly what he’s going to do. He’s already got the speech half-memorized, if he’s honest.

* * *

Bully likes plays. Not hockey plays—well, he likes those too, obviously—but he likes going to the theater and seeing a play, and he’ll even settle for reading one if seeing it in person isn’t an option. He’s learned to keep this quiet around hockey bros by now, of course—his buddies in juniors laughed their heads off when they found Bully’s copy of _Waiting for Godot_ and figured out what it was. But he’s pretty excited by this challenge Ford has issued. 

His all-time favorite play is _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_. He read it for the first time right after his first time reading _Hamlet_ , so he got all the little jokes and references. He’s reread both of them since, and they both hit so hard every time, for such different reasons. Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard are separated by centuries and belong to pretty different literary traditions in a lot of ways, and _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ asks a lot of questions that Hamlet sort of glosses over, but also Hamlet has a piece of Bully’s soul, and he loves both of them. 

His favorite moment in _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ is probably when one of them literally yells “Fire!” into the crowded theater, but that’s definitely not a monologue. He gets his copy of the play off the bookshelf in his dorm (yeah, he brought it to college—sue him; it’s basically comfort food) and starts paging through it. Gosh, he loves the coin-flipping scene. He eyes Guildenstern’s monologue from that scene. It’s pretty long. Can he really memorize this? But then he sees that it contains the line “The sun came up about as often as it went down, in the long run,” and he grins. He has to do this one. He just has to.

* * *

Hops is grateful that his high school had a bunch of electives for English class, because it seems like a lot of his teammates and classmates have never read, like, _anything_ by a Black author, and that . . . sucks. It sucks enough to be surrounded by mostly white people who have no idea about Black history or the Black American literary tradition. If Hops didn’t know that history either . . . yeah, that wouldn’t be fun. But Hops’s high school had a bunch of electives for all subjects, including English, so Hops took a class on the Harlem Renaissance for a semester, and then the following semester he took a class on African American literature that’s been written in the time since then. 

Of course, he doesn’t have any of the plays that they read in those classes with him at Samwell—he never owned them, since in high school he and his classmates checked all their school books out of the school library rather than buying them. Most, if not all, of what he read in those classes hasn’t hit the public domain yet, and Hops doesn’t want to pirate anything, so he heads to Founders’ to check their selection of plays he’s already read. He really hopes they have something by August Wilson. He’s not sure whether he prefers _Fences_ or _The Piano Lesson_ ; they both earned their Pulitzers, in Hops’s opinion. 

The library makes his mind up for him, though, when it comes to which play he’s going to choose a monologue from: _Fences_ is checked out and not due back for a while, whereas the copy of _The Piano Lesson_ is listed as “check shelf.” Hops does indeed check the shelf, and there it is. He checks the book out but then stays in the library to flip through it, because honestly he doesn’t love his roommate and he’s been spending a lot of his spare time in the library lately and probably will continue to do so all year. 

Boy Willie obviously has the most monologues in the play, and Lymon talks a bunch too, and even Avery has a monologue about that one dream he has, but after flipping back and forth from one monologue to another for a while Hops decides on Doaker’s monologue toward the beginning. The message about trains leaving and coming back feels pretty universal, and Hops doesn’t know the hockey team well enough yet to be sure about whether he’s comfortable reciting one of Boy Willie’s monologues about race to them, so trains it is. Hops supposes he could ask Nursey what he’s planning on doing, to try to get a feel for what the team might be cool with, but honestly the guy is a little intimidating, being so put-together and preppy all the time, and Hops isn’t sure they’ve ever had a one-on-one conversation. And anyway, Hops feels pretty good about learning Doaker’s monologue, even if it is really long.

* * *

Louis spends the morning thinking about what Ford said, about how he wouldn’t win if she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Part of him still wants to do a monologue in Swedish, just because he’s pretty sure he’s the only Swede at Samwell and it’s really lonely, and he misses his mother tongue, but also he wants a chance at that sweater. So by lunchtime he figures he should probably just find an English translation of a Strindberg play and use a monologue from there. After all, he read multiple Strindberg plays in secondary school. 

But he read them in Swedish and he didn’t take copies of the plays with him when he flew across the Atlantic to come to Samwell. So he looks up Strindberg plays online, because they’re old enough to not be under copyright anymore, and sure enough, he finds a collection of Strindberg plays in English on Project Gutenberg. He scrolls down to _Miss Julia_ —which is a weird play, when he stops to think about it, and even though he discussed it in class he’s not sure if he’s ever really understood it—and skims through it, looking for that one speech Jean gives where he talks about having fallen for Miss Julia when they were both kids. It’s hard to skim in English, honestly, and it’s going to be hard to memorize this in English, too, but this is what he gets for wanting to come to the US for university rather than shooting for Uppsala or Lund like all his friends back home.

* * *

Two weeks later, about half the hockey team has gathered in the living room of the Haus to compete at reciting monologues. Ford has really enjoyed watching her boys walking around muttering lines to themselves for the past couple weeks. Tango even asked her if she’d give him some pointers on Shakespearean diction, but she figured that would look like favoritism, so she’d tried to be gentle when she said no to that. She knows not everyone is participating, but half the team is still good turnout in Ford’s book, and she’s really looking forward to hearing this. Whether it’s great or it’s terrible, this should be entertaining. 

“Who’s going first?” Ford asks when it’s 7:05 p.m. and everyone she expected to show up has indeed shown up. The Frogs are jammed onto the couch, Bitty has the armchair, Ollie and Wicks brought in chairs from the kitchen, and the five participating underclassmen (other than Ford, who also has a chair from the kitchen) are sprawled out on the floor. 

It’s quiet for several moments, the boys glancing around at each other in a seemingly endless cycle of not-it, before Nursey gets up and says, “Fine, be that way. I’ll go first. This is a monologue by Walter from Lorraine Hansberry’s _A Raisin in the Sun_.” He clears his throat, looks down at his feet, and then something in his posture shifts as he looks up and says, “‘Mama—you don’t know all the things a man what got leisure can find to do in this city . . .’” He speaks slowly, not as though he, Nursey, has forgotten the words, but more like he, as Walter, is trying to find them for the first time. The monologue rolls on for a while, gently in one sense but also undercut with tension that Ford, who hasn’t read this particular play, can’t quite name. And then suddenly it’s over; Nursey cuts himself off, waits a few beats, and then says, “Yeah, I know it ends really abruptly. The last punctuation is literally an em dash, not even a period or whatever. But anyway, that’s the monologue.” Then he smiles and adds, “Any of you losers think you can beat that?”

It’s quiet again, and then Whiskey levers himself up from the floor and says, “I know I can’t beat that, but I may as well get it over with.” Nursey sits down and Whiskey takes his place and says, “This is Don John from _Much Ado about Nothing_. ‘I wonder that thou, being, as thou sayst thou art, born under Saturn, goest about to apply a moral medicine to a mortifying mischief . . .’” It’s a short speech and is over very quickly, and then Whiskey, without any further comment, takes his place on the floor once again. 

“That’s it?” Bitty asks. “Lord, I didn’t know they could be so short.” 

“Yeah, well, I can already tell you he didn’t win,” Ford replies to general laughter. 

“Fair enough,” says Bitty. Then he stands. “Oh, whatever, as long as I’m talking I may as well do this.” He walks in front of the TV and says, “This is Romeo, from _Romeo and Juliet_ , obviously. ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun . . .’” He continues decently until “Her vestal livery is but sick and green,” and then he fumbles. 

It’s Bully who calls out, “‘And none but fools do wear it’!”

Bitty’s eyes widen as he looks at Bully, but he doesn’t comment, instead picking up where he left off: “‘And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off . . .’” This time, he makes it to the end, though his stage presence leaves a lot to be desired. 

“Bully, how did you just know that line?” Tango asks as Bitty retakes the armchair. 

Bully shrugs. “I like theater. Like, a lot.” 

“You can go next, then,” says Ford. 

“Sure,” says Bully, standing. “This is from _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ by Tom Stoppard. It’s one of Guildenstern’s monologues.” He does the thing Nursey did, looking at the floor and shifting his posture as he looks back up at the room at large. “‘A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear . . .’” Ford hasn’t read this play, either—she’s pretty well read, but she’s also eighteen, so sue her—and honestly it’s kind of a bizarre speech, full of big words that Ford knows and can define but wouldn’t be likely to use in everyday conversation. Even though it’s bizarre, though, it’s not confusing, especially the way Bully’s acting. He’s clearly agitated about something. Even though the source of the agitation doesn’t come until the end, when he mentions having flipped 92 coins in a row and having them all come up heads, it’s never unclear what he’s feeling. 

When Bully finishes and sits down, Tango says, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are from _Hamlet_ , right?”

“Yeah,” says Bully. “But _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ is a separate play, based on _Hamlet_ but doing its own thing.” 

“Well, I’ve got a speech from _Hamlet_ , so I guess I should go next,” says Tango, getting up. “Pretty sure this one doesn’t need an introduction. ‘To be or not to be—that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .’” Tango’s reciting in exactly his usual voice with exactly his usual diction, and Ford gets it now, why he asked her for help. On the one hand, there’s something refreshing about hearing Shakespeare in a New Jersey accent and not any sort of affected faux-British pronunciation, and hearing it in a cadence that people actually use to speak, but Tango has definitely taken the naturalism too far—he’s rushing through the speech, talking a hundred miles an hour like he always does, and it sounds so flat. Hamlet is contemplating death in this scene. Tango sounds like he’s impatiently ordering a coffee. 

Ford manages not to laugh when Tango finishes the monologue, but that’s the best that can be said for her reaction. No one looks impressed. 

Wicks stands as Tango is taking his seat. “I’ll go next. I’ve got a speech from _Clouds_ by Aristophanes. It’s by—not really a character. Um, these arguments come onstage, played by actors, obviously, and try to persuade people to believe in them. This is from the argument that’s supposed to be the good one. Okay, here goes. ‘Yet certainly these are those principles by which my system of education nurtured the men who fought at Marathon . . .’” He goes on for a while, much slower than Tango, and Ford thinks he’s just doing a better job of acting well and not rushing until she realizes that he’s struggling to remember his lines. She doesn’t come to this conclusion until he says, “‘And not to dart into the house of a dancing-woman, lest—lest—lest . . .’”

It’s Ollie who supplies the line this time: “‘Lest, while gaping after these things . . .’”

“Right,” says Wicks, completely breaking character. He doesn’t really resume character as he resumes reciting: “‘Lest, while gaping after these things, being struck with an apple by a wanton, you should be damaged in your reputation . . .’” He makes it to the end this time, though he never really returns to the voice he’d started the monologue with. 

“I’ll go next,” says Ollie, standing and kissing the top of Wicks’s head as Wicks sits down. Once Ollie is standing in front of the TV, he says, “I’ve also got a monologue from an ancient Greek play. This is one of Creon’s monologues from _Antigone_ by Sophocles.” He doesn’t look at the floor, but he does stand up straighter before starting to recite: “‘Stop now, before you fill me up with rage, or you’ll prove yourself insane as well as old . . .’” It’s a kind of gory speech, centering as it does around the fate of a corpse, and Ford isn’t sure she’s supposed to like the character Ollie is portraying, but it’s interesting and he’s doing a good job, pausing dramatically here and there and seeming clearly angry at whoever he’s talking to. He reaches the end, relaxes his posture a bit, runs a hand through his hair, and says, “So, yeah.” 

“You did great, Ol,” says Wicks, taking Ollie’s hand as Ollie sits back down.

“Who’s next?” Ford asks. “Don’t make me call on you. I know you all want that sweater.” 

“I’ll go,” says Chowder. “This is one of Antony’s monologues from _Julius Caesar_.” He looks sad, suddenly, and Ford realizes she’s not sure she’s ever seen Chowder looking actually sad before. It’s not that he’s always happy—he spends a lot of time looking like he’s concentrating really hard, and she’s seen him confused and frustrated and hopeful, but sad? Nope. She hasn’t been managing this team even a full semester, so it’s not _that_ surprising, but still. 

Chowder keeps looking sad as he begins to speak: “‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him . . .’” His sadness crescendos, building into a fury born of deep pain, as he recounts all the ways Caesar never seemed ambitious and repeats, with growing irony, the bit about Brutus being an honorable man. He’s talking with his hands more than anyone else has, so far, and Ford thinks suddenly that Chowder must have looked up videos of other people performing this exact monologue, because he’s not an actor but he is really good at learning things when he puts his mind to it. And then, at the very end of the speech, the fury falls away, and the only thing left is Chowder’s terrible sadness as he says, “Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me.” 

“Dang,” says Nursey as Chowder squeezes himself back onto the couch. “C, that was amazing.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” says Chowder in his usual voice, and it’s so unlike the voice he was just using to recite that Ford actually gets chills just noticing the difference. “You did well, too.” 

“Well, I guess it’s time for me to make a fool of myself,” says Dex. He stands. “This is one of Benedick’s monologues from _Much Ado about Nothing_. I guess Whiskey and I were kind of thinking along the same lines, picking the same play. Anyway. ‘This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne; they have the truth of this from Hero; they seem to pity the lady . . .’” He gets more into it than Ford expected, though that was a very low bar. He’s certainly not as in character as Nursey or Bully or Ollie or Chowder, but he builds up a bit of a head of steam nonetheless, and Ford isn’t the only one who laughs at least a little at the line “The world must be peopled.” Dex blushes at that and smiles as he resumes his seat one the monologue is over. 

No one stands up to go next, so Ford says, “Hops and Louis, it’s just the two of you left.” 

The two of them are sitting next to each other on the floor, and now they exchange a look that Ford can’t read even though they’ve only known each other for like two months and should definitely not have a private language already, what even. “Do you want to go next?” Hops asks Louis. 

Louis shrugs. “I can, but I don’t have to.” 

“Okay, I will,” says Hops, pushing himself to stand. “This is one of Doaker’s monologues from August Wilson’s _The Piano Lesson_.” 

“Right on!” Nursey cheers. “I love that play.” 

Hops smiles at that and then clears his throat and starts reciting: “‘Twenty-seven years. Now, I’ll tell you something about the railroad. What I done learned after twenty-seven years . . .’” This is a play Ford has read, but she didn’t pay as much attention to Doaker as a character as she did to the other characters, and she doesn’t have a particularly strong memory of this monologue. It’s quite fun, then, to watch Hops recite it, getting into the storytelling aspect of the speech. It’s not nearly as emotional a speech as the one Chowder recited, and Hops isn’t going to win, but he does a good job and Ford smiles at him at the end. 

Louis pops up as soon as Hops sits back down. “This is from _Fröken Julia_ , or I guess you’d say _Miss Julia_ , by August Stindberg,” says Louis. Ford has never heard his accent this strong: he says “Julia” like “Yulia” and “August Strindberg” like “Oh-gust Strind-berry,” and it’s like the words are balancing somewhere different in his mouth than they normally do. “The character who’s speaking is called Jean”—pronounced the French way, because apparently there weren’t enough languages floating around here. “Okay, here we go. ‘Once I got into the Garden of Eden with my mother to weed the onion beds . . .’” His voice lilts more than usual as he recites the monologue, and he goes at a slow, deliberate speed, but Ford has no idea what emotion he’s trying to capture. Bitterness? Longing? Fatigue? He doesn’t seem particularly happy, but that’s as much as Ford can pin down. 

When Louis reaches the end of his monologue and sits down, Ford says, “Well, you did excellently. Thank you for indulging me and playing along with this competition! It’s really fun to see you doing something other than hockey and partying. Chowder, I’ll need your measurements for that sweater.” 

“Me?” says Chowder, looking over the back of the couch at Ford. 

“Don’t doubt yourself, man,” says Nursey. “I told you that you were swawesome!” 

“I mean, I definitely wanted it,” says Chowder. “I just—wow. So many of you were swawesome too!” 

Movement catches Ford’s eye and she turns her head to see Bitty entering from the kitchen—when did he leave?—bearing a pie in each hand. “Congratulations, Chowder. Now, do y’all want pie?”

Dex rolls his eyes. “‘Do we want pie?’ Bitty, is water wet? Yes, we want pie.” 

“Well, come get plates, then,” says Bitty. 

There’s a general stampede to the kitchen, but Chowder lingers in the living room, eyes on Ford. “I really won?”

“Chyeah,” Ford replies. “That was so impressive, what you did there. I know it would be awful with your hockey schedule, but you could totally act, if time weren’t an issue.” 

Chowder makes a face. “Maybe. I spent like every spare moment on that monologue for the past two weeks. I don’t think I can memorize things fast enough to be in an actual play.” 

Ford studies him. “You really wanted that sweater, didn’t you?”

“Yep,” says Chowder. “Your knitting is swawesome.” 

“Thanks,” says Ford.

“Thanks for what you said, too,” Chowder replies. “So, pie?”

“Chyeah,” Ford answers. “I’m always down for pie.”


End file.
